Bullet Boys by Ally Kennen – review

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Times are hard for writers of realistic fiction for teenagers. The siren call of vampires, werewolves and zombies offers the chance of hot sales and crossover success. For those not tempted by the supernatural, the future beckons in the form of withered dystopian landscapes in which a teenage heroine can battle with crossbows against mutants, while you wait for the film money to roll in. Even Y/A novels with a contemporary setting tend to involve kids unexpectedly finding themselves to be secret agents, Ninja hitmen or cyborgs.

And yet, despite the market's indifference, much of the finest teen writing of recent years – books by Meg Rosoff, Keith Gray, Mal Peet, Phil Earl, Bali Rai and Catherine Bruton, among others – has been broadly within the realist fold. And perhaps no one has caught the intensity and mystery of the teenage experience quite so well as Ally Kennen.

Kennen's finest work tends to spring from a dominating central metaphor (the ravening crocodile in Beast, the ruined asylum in Bedlam), creating a world that is recognisably ours and yet suffused with strangeness and horror. Her latest book, Bullet Boys, lacks that unifying image, but it embodies many of the author's other characteristic qualities. The writing is by turns deft and powerful, and Kennen is equally good at profoundly resonating images and witty one-liners.

Set on and around the bleakly beautiful Dartmoor, the novel focuses on the relationship between three boys on the cusp of manhood: Alex, the quiet and intense son of a gamekeeper, only truly comfortable traipsing the heath with a gun in his hand; Levi, a friendly flirt and social fixer; and Max, recently expelled from his public school, and at war with his domineering parents.

Alex is the moral centre of the story, and some of the book's best moments concern his relationship with his father, who has never quite got over the loss of Alex's mother, who died when he was six. She wrote Alex a series of letters, to be given to the boy on his birthdays, and these provide at least one whole novel's worth of poignant material. I was a little troubled by the way that Alex regards foxes, crows and rooks as nothing more than vermin to be extirpated, but that, I suppose, is a realistic depiction of the gamekeeper's worldview. Occasionally it's good for us townies to have our prejudices examined.

However, Bullet Boys is not Kennen quite at her peak. The main problem is the plot, the inciting incident of which is the discovery by Alex and Levi of a cache of weapons on MoD land. We suddenly find ourselves in a different sort of novel, one in which the smell of cordite comes a little too close to the whiff of bullshit. The boys tear around Dartmoor pursued by deranged soldiers and raging heathland fires and, frankly, much of the brilliantly built-up tension, like the gorse, goes up in smoke.

I was also perplexed by the decision to tell the story in the third person from Alex's perspective, and in the first from Max's. It added little other than a mild confusion, and contributed to the feeling that this was a moving study of family and peer relationships, somehow hijacked by Bear Grylls.

Nevertheless, Kennen remains an excellent novelist, and Bullet Boys will entertain those looking for action, as well as holding those readers searching for a more nuanced look at boys becoming men.

• Anthony McGowan's The Knife that Killed Me is published by Definitions.